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Wednesday, July 27, 2005

"Parents Magazine" apparently cool w/ kids ingesting toxins

The following is excerpted from the newsletter "ORGANIC BYTES" (#62, published by Organic Consumers Association):

"PARENTING ADVICE: EAT YOUR PESTICIDES"Parents Magazine", one of the most influential parenting publications in the U.S., advised parents not to worry about pesticide residues in children's food in its recent August 2005 issue. In an article titled "Food Under Fire," the magazine belittles the benefits of organic foods as a myth, and endorses pesticides in foods as safe, stating: "there's no evidence that these chemicals, used at the low levels found in our food supply, are harmful to children." The author of the piece based his research on the opinion of a single "expert," never mentioning three decades of scientific evidence from academic, government and industry sources that states otherwise. The magazine serves as a "parenting guide" to more than 14 million subscribers....write a quick letter to their editor here: mailbag@parentsmagazine.com."____________________________________

What follows is my quick letter to the PARENTS MAGAZINE editor:

"Any parent knows that infants and children are generally more vulnerable to toxic substances. For PARENTS MAGAZINE to disregard years of research findings and to conclude ("Food Under Fire", August 2005) that toxins such as pesticides are somehow to be tolerated in our children's early life diet is blatant irresponsibility. At first meal, at second ingestion, perhaps a child appears to have experienced no harm. But reared on a consistent diet of foods heavily-laden with known toxic ingredients, some level of cumulative harm is inevitable for even the most robust of children. It concerns me that PARENTS MAGAZINE has chosen to relax its standards of acceptability of toxins in our world.